


[your albatross: carry it with no regrets]

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: [to see you there] [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Backstory, Clint Barton's ethics, External/Objective POV, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 18:20:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11492022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: Five moments in Clint Barton's life.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Your usual reminder that canon for my stuff stops at _Captain America: The Winter Soldier_ and that excludes most backstory elements revealed after that point. 
> 
> C/n for various bad things mentioned happening off-screen.

Picture a boy. 

Light brown hair, hazel eyes, pale skin. About seventeen. A face that'll be a lot prettier when the teenaged acne clears up, and if he stops getting scrapes and bruises and the other accumulated marks of fist-fights both playful and really, really not playful at all. A frame that will eventually fill in so that he looks as strong as he is, but for now almost seems like sticks wrapped with wires, so that people are startled when he's nowhere near as fragile as he thinks he is. 

Worn clothes, of the kind a teenage boy might wear, that make it impossible to tell if they're worn because he can't get new ones or just refuses to bother. A hole in one knee of his jeans, with a tear in the knee of the other that can't be called a "hole" anymore, as it runs from seam to seam across the front. Ragged frayed edges on the hems around his sneakers. A shirt that might have been neon green once and now is vaguely the colour of disquieting rot. Jeans and shirt both grass-stained here and there. Dirty sneakers, the tread cracking in places. Dirty sweat-socks. 

Right now there's a bruise on his cheek and a half-healed split lip. There's bruises on his collar-bone and scrapes on his knuckles. As he runs, he stumbles once and skins his knee on a fallen log. 

Oh yes: picture him running. 

Picture woods of the kind you get on the edge of a small town in the American midwest, where the brief pretense at urban anything runs out, and where nobody's actually kept up any farms, so bushes and trees and everything else have taken the land back. Here and there might be a ruin of a barn, being eaten by the landscape, and the same kind of wreckage of an ancient fence, but mostly there's deciduous trees and bushes and deceptive fields that are just as gnarled and knotted and hard to get through as the parts under trees. 

Where the boy runs there's sometimes signs of what might be a path, but not always. This late in the summer there's little in the way of mud and this side of the town there aren't any working farms, so only deer droppings lurk in the undergrowth. 

The boy runs like he's chasing something down, but there's nothing in front of him: just the landscape, same before and behind and on every damn side. There's a rough home-made quiver full of cheap fibreglass arrows on his back and a cheap fibreglass bow in his hand - stolen by his brother from a summer camp, years ago - but he's not hunting anything, not on purpose. 

There are obstacles in his way, ones you would think would block the path or make him slow, but he doesn't seem to care and doesn't bother to slow down. 

One hand goes up to catch a tree branch as he jumps, uses the branch and momentum to swing himself over a half-fallen gate that would still be too high for him to clear without the tree's help. Later he half runs up a fallen beam and throws himself over a fence: on the other side he rolls and some kind of stick or prickle-bush opens a new red scrape on his arm, but he doesn't seem to care. 

He's lived his whole life in this hundred-square-mile radius, bar one trip to St Louis to see a grandfather die. He's never had cable. The movie-theatre here used to get things months after they'd already gone around everywhere else and it burned down two years ago. Nobody's rebuilt it. It'll be decades before the internet opens international vistas to kids like him. 

He won't hear about young men in Paris banlieues taking the same need as he feels now and turning it into a style of movement cohesive enough for a name (for two names, born out of the inevitable conflict), not for years yet - though when he does he'll mine everything he can get about them for all of their tricks. But for now, it might as well be hidden on the moon. He doesn't know that across an ocean, the same thing is happening. 

He taught himself to do this. 

He taught himself to do a lot of things, all the things he's needed to learn when there wasn't anyone around to teach him. 

Right now he needs to run. There's just nothing to run to, or after, or from. 

He only stops when he hits a half-hearted attempt at a cliff in the terrain where it overlooks a creek. And here, maybe he only stops because here the creek is wide enough that even his headlong, reckless plunge shies at the idea of trying to make it across into the broken windbreak on the other side, into the fields beyond that. Even his need has to bow to the fact that he wouldn't make it. 

The boy stands on the edge of the not-quite-a-cliff with the fibreglass bow in one hand, and the other opening and closing in a fist. His jaw is tight and he stares into the middle-distance, like he wishes he could kill it with a look. His heavy breathing is from running, of course - but also from something else. 

Something different. 

There's a noise behind him and it's as if he doesn't need to think before he moves - and also like he's kind of disappointed when what the arrow pins to the tree-trunk is a squirrel, not a human. And then disappointment clouds into something else, and he passes a hand over his face. He yanks the arrow out, takes the still-warm little body, and throws it into the bushes for something to find and eat. Wipes the blood off on his jeans. 

His older brother taught him to shoot. 

The thought's heavy on his mind: how his oldest brother taught him to shoot. How after a cousin's last weapons-related arrest, his own mother went through the whole extended family and got rid of all the guns except for three rifles that were expensive or important, and those went into a safe in her room with the key on her chain around her neck. How when the boy's brother complained about having no way to shoot squirrels or anything else, their mother just yelled at him for a while. 

Their mother never yells. So even the brother shut up about it. But he came home from the local church camp that year with two of the bows from their archery class, stolen, and when the boy kept asking his brother taught him to shoot, too. 

A few years later everyone else was back to rifles, but the boy kept the bow. It was quiet and secret and in the privacy of his head he could pretend to be Robin Hood, whereas all the people he could pretend to be with a rifle were assholes, as far as he could tell. And he got better at it than his brother, even if his brother was the one who still showed off tricks sometimes and got the applause. The boy kept his tricks to himself. Even from his brother.

Earlier today he punched his brother in the face. His brother didn't see it coming, took a few seconds to hit back because the boy's never, ever started _that_ kind of fight before. Never hit that hard. Never _tried_ to hurt. 

But their mother had a stroke, two weeks ago. After the boy asked her about something. After he ended up shouting at her about the answer, asking her how she could live with herself, if she could hear what her excuses sounded like, if it didn't _bother_ her that one of her nephews was in the ground and she'd never tried to help him, protected the man who hurt him instead. 

Pretended she could believe that nephew's dad instead, her brother, when she _knew_. And how she could keep sitting there, saying she didn't know. Saying the nephew took it back. Said he'd made it up. Saying there was never any _proof_ her brother did any of that, how all the accusations were always taken back, or recanted, or - 

Eventually the boy'd left. And he'd run away overnight, slept out in one of his old forts in these same woods, further down the creek. When he came back after school the next day his dad told him off for upsetting his mother, told him about how she cried all night and how he couldn't do that to someone with her condition. How he should go apologize. 

He didn't go apologize. He wasn't sorry. He still isn't sorry. He went to his room, and didn't come out again until supper. And nobody said anything. 

Two days later, his mom had a stroke. She's always been on medicine, it's supposed to keep that from happening, but sometimes (the doctors say) that kind of thing can get overwhelmed by stress. She had a stroke. 

They got her to the hospital in time. Sort of. Except she hasn't been . . . _right_ yet, and she still forgets things and sleeps too much and cries. 

Today, his brother decided to yell at him about it. And the boy tried to walk away, to start with, but when his brother started with _Jesus even the police dropped it -_ the boy lost his temper. 

Turned around and shouted back _and if it was me? Would you even care?_

And there's a whole lifetime, his whole lifetime, behind that question. And it's the kind of question that people'd ask you, how could you even ask that? Except he knows how he can damn well ask it. And so does his brother. Even if his brother thinks he's wrong. _So you don't care about someone else enough to make life difficult for you, but would you care enough to stand by me?_ He can ask the question because he's pretty sure of the answer. 

It's not the answer he wants, or the answer his brother wants to think he'd give. They both know that. 

It hit: he watched it hit. He watched his brother rear back like he'd hit him with his fist instead, and stare, and then watched his brother's face slide into the shape it gets when he's going to be nasty. It's easy to read. The boy's seen that look. A lot. 

Just till now, always pointed at someone else. 

And his brother said, _Well if you think you'd get so pathetic you were basically asking for it, like -_ and didn't get any further, because the boy hit him so hard in the face a tooth chipped. 

They were still fighting when the cops got there, coming because one of their younger aunts called after trying to separate them just got her husband a bleeding nose of his own. Nobody really noticed the panicked look on the older brother's face, when they were pulled apart, or the way he seemed to be struggling with the fact that for all that they were still fighting, for all he has inches and pounds on his baby brother, for all he's supposed to be a better fighter than the boy - 

\- he was definitely losing. 

 

A few hours later, the one female cop in town drove him home. Except she stopped, a few blocks away. She pulled over, put the car in park and said, "I'm sorry about your cousin." 

The boy looked at her, sidelong, but just shrugged and didn't answer. 

(His brother's still at the station, staying there overnight because he took a swing at one of the other cops because he's an idiot. He's lucky: he's pissed off enough of the cops in this town they could've decided to nail him for assault, but even the cops he's pissed off feel bad about his mom. For now.) 

After a moment, the cop said, "I know he wasn't lying." One of her hands was on the steering wheel, and she kept her gaze out the front window. When the boy looked at her, he could see the unhappiness there. It was the kind people wear when they know they can't do anything about the thing they're unhappy about. It's the kind that goes with helplessness. 

"Still dropped it," he said, and he couldn't tell you if he was pushing the moment of confidence away, or if he was giving her a way to keep it going. He's not sure he even knew. 

"Yeah," she said. Sighed. She leaned back in the seat and looked at him. "Know why?" 

He shrugged, but this time it was uncomfortable. He's never been sure if he liked her or not. She's always been a hardass, but she hasn't ever been . . . unfair, exactly. She doesn't have kids. She seems to really care about things. Sitting in her car, he wasn't sure what to think about this. 

"You know you can't try someone for the same crime twice?" she asked and he gave her a disgusted look. 

"Appeals happen all the time," he started, and she shook her head. 

"Appeals are different, kiddo," she said, softly. "Appeals happen when there was something _wrong_ with the first trial - like someone hid evidence from the defense, or a cop did something wrong, or the judge did, or the jury was prejudiced or something. If it was a fair trial, it's over, and the appeal gets denied. And then it's _done_ , kiddo. That time, that crime, it's over."

The boy stayed silent. Tried to fit that into what he knew about the world. 

"You know how hard it is to get a conviction for something like this when there's no . . ." she exhaled in a rush, in a sigh. "No marks, no bruises, no injury? Because I do, and it's really fucking hard. Nobody wants to think parents do this shit, and everybody knows there's times they do shit to their kids they shouldn't - smack'em or lock them out or other shit, and they're all afraid if they let people start actually holding them fucking accountable, they'll be next, so they decide the kid's lying before they even listen. Trust me. In a town like this, it's fucking worse." 

She hit the heel of her hand on the edge of the steering wheel, but it was almost like she didn't notice. "We kept pushing it, sure, maybe could've got them to take it to trial," she said, "but he'd get acquitted and that'd be it. Never be able to try again, not even if Grant grew up and got away and found some way to be safe and stopped being so scared and stuck to the story later. And meanwhile he'd get dragged up there, in the trial, and that son of a bitch'd be doing everything he could to make sure Grant stuck to recanting. And we both know he's a fucking moron so maybe he'd try so hard, Grant wouldn't survive it." 

The boy stared at her. Nobody talks like this. Nobody'd ever talked like this to him, or about his uncle, or anything. And the cop looked like maybe if she weren't as tough a person as she is, she'd be crying. 

It felt like his head was opening up and it wasn't . . . he didn't like it. But it was like the first time anyone ever told him the truth, anyone _fucking admitted_ just how bad it - just . . . everything. Everything he thought but everyone said wasn't there. 

He didn't know what to do with that, sitting in the car. 

Still doesn't, now. 

"So nobody'd win," she said. "So yeah for now we fucking dropped it, so we could just . . .wait. I guess." 

After a long pause, all he could think of to say was, "He's still dead," and his voice was weird and raspy when he said it. And he wondered if he was going to cry. 

"Yeah," she said, quietly. "So nobody wins anyway. That's why I'm sorry." 

"I should go home," he said. "Dad'll be worried." 

They both knew that was a lie: his dad would probably just be drunk, and with the boy and his brother gone, one of the aunts would've taken his mom to her house. Maybe. Hopefully. 

The cop drove him home. 

When he started to get out she said, "Look - Clinton. Do me a favour, okay?" 

He stared at her, wary, but she said, "Get out of this town. When you can. After school, if you get a chance - no, okay, _find_ a chance. You're a mouthy little shit and you're a pain in my ass but you're smart and you give a fuck about people and you could be something other than a dead-end drunk helping your uncle fence worthless shit and move drugs, but you _won't be_ if you stay here. So get out. Okay? I'm sorry. I'm sorry about Grant, I'm sorry about your mom, I'm sorry about every fuckin' person in your family who doesn't deserve the shit life handed them, but don't just sit here and be another one. Go do something else." 

The boy could only shut the door and walk across the street. 

And the house was empty except for his dad snoring on the couch, so he got his bow and came out here. 

He wanted to ask the cop, so what - you just wait? Wait until the next time? The next kid? Because there's going to be a next time, he knows it and he thinks she knows it - but he knows what she'd say, too, which is that yeah. That's all she can do. And it's not, or he doesn't think it is, or - 

Or he doesn't think it's all she should be able to do, if the world worked right, but fuck: he knows two of the other cops drink with his fucking uncle, and nobody cared about Grant anyway. Grant was only ever trouble, anyway. To them. To most people. To the boy himself, for a long time. 

It isn't fair, but he's already old enough to know that _it's not fair_ just sounds like whining. 

So yeah: just wait. That's all she can do. 

And she told him to leave. But if he leaves then he thinks maybe that cop's the only person who even fucking _cares_ about "next time". 

And every second he stays here, where _here_ is anywhere he's known his whole life, anywhere he's called home - every second he stays, he wants to take more of his own skin off because it all feels diseased, sick, rotten now. He wants to go. He knows he can, knows where he can get money and throw his own shit that he cares about into a bag and go and never come back. He knows. And every second he stays here he feels worse. 

And he doesn't feel anything about leaving anyone behind, because it's like they all died already, falling one by one over the whole summer since he found Grant hanging in his own closet. Turning out to be someone else. Not who the boy thought they were. Everyone he knew - thought he knew - is actually dead anyway, in the way that means they don't exist and he can't have them. In their places are these strangers, wearing the same faces, with rot and scum and slim and shit underneath. 

People who'd rather let a kid die than make their own lives harder. Definitely rather let a kid suffer, the way no kid should have to. The boy can't . . . deal with that. 

His mother's answer to _what if it were me, would you believe me_ had been to burst into tears, had been a long babble of swearing _yes_ and explaining how it wouldn't be anyway, because none of it was true, but the boy figures it's really just a less honest version of what his brother said. Like there was some huge difference between him and Grant, something more than just luck of where they were born Like somehow it was Grant's fault. 

And if it had happened to him, it could only have happened because he did something wrong, and it would've been his fault too. 

It makes everything . . . wrong. Untrue. 

He can't take it. He wants to go. 

It's just if he goes, like this is now, there'll be the next one. Because only one person other than him even cares, and she can't do shit. 

After a few minutes staring at the place where he threw the squirrel, the boy drops down into a crouch and rests his head on his arms and tries to think about what the fuck he's going to do. 

 

Two days later, in the early morning, someone heading into town sees the wreckage of a single-vehicle crash on the highway. It's a bad one. The person who finds it just drives in to a pay phone to call the cops, because there's nothing alive in that mess. 

The truck went off the road at a nasty curve, straight down the embankment, obviously going pretty fast. It hit a tree, flipped over, rolled a few times, and came to rest in the creek at the bottom. The driver's dead at the scene, dead for a few hours, and nobody else's in the car. 

Autopsy finds a blood alcohol of a little over point-three-percent. The deceased has a history of drunk driving, and of drinking alone. It's too bad for his widow, though, everyone says - first having her husband wrongfully accused of molesting their kid, then the kid cracks under the pressure and hangs himself in his room, now this. One of the responding officers says he hopes the poor bastard had a life insurance policy on him. 

Just to round off the family's bad year, too, it's about a week later that the guy's nephew runs away: steals about a thousand bucks in cash his mom and dad apparently kept around hidden behind the air vent in the bathroom, leaves a note telling them he's going, he's not coming back, and not to try to find him, and takes off. Nobody's sure where. 

The kid's older brother says _good riddance, he turned into a fucking little pill_ in a tight voice, and everyone drops it. The guy's got his mom to look after, after all. 

Everyone assumes the kid's dead, body a John Doe somewhere if it was even found; nobody ever hears from him again.


	2. Chapter 2

In a townhouse in Odessa, a girl sits on a couch with her hands folded in her lap, and her body tensed like she's waiting for an explosion. 

She's twenty, maybe. Her hair is blonde, and unlike many of her friends it grows that colour all on its own - she doesn't have to bleach it. Her eyes are brown, her complexion is ivory, and she's wearing false eyelashes and red lipstick. Her makeup is perfect and just one side of trashy. Her face is heart-shaped, more likely to be called _pretty_ or _cute_ than _beautiful_. 

She picks at the fabric of the jeans she wears - an older pair, their scuffs and rips and frays honestly earned and not pre-made then bought off the shelves in Berlin or Paris. But she's bought clothes in Berlin and Paris. She's visited there. Other jeans in her drawers look like this off the rack. 

She's wearing an old, comfortable t-shirt, too, despite the perfect makeup. Her feet are bare, but that's because today she'd slip on heeled sandals if she went outside. She has a silver anklet and a little ring with a flower on it around her middle right toe. 

Her furniture is good. Most of it is rented, because she hasn't been in Odessa that long, and she probably won't stay more than a couple more months. But there are photos on the walls, of her and her family and one or two of her with the young man who's standing and looking out the front window, with his arms folded. She likes having her own photos, wherever she goes. 

There are none of him without her, and none of his family. They've been together two years, and she's only asked about his family once. He didn't get angry. He just said he didn't have any. Then he said he didn't want to talk about it and kissed her instead, and fell asleep after the sex that followed the kissing. She took the hint. 

There's none of any friends of his from before they met in Kiev, either. Sometimes she thinks he'd rather his life from before, back in America where he comes from, didn't exist. She doesn't know why. She's never pressed the issue. 

His hair is short, a soft brown. His eyes would be hazel, if she could see them. He's handsome, good-looking, but not so that he'd stand out, and he's . . .average - not big and bulky, but not small or slender either. Ordinary. He's squinting out at the hazy sunlight. There's nothing much to read on his face, except that maybe - maybe his jaw is a little tight. 

She called him to come over. He'd been at someone else's house, to talk business - or maybe not a house. Maybe somewhere else. The point is he was out, has been for a couple days. The girl doesn't even know where. She doesn't _ask_ where. It's better not to ask that kind of thing. 

But after the test, after crying and panicking at Nadya for almost a day and a half, after all of it - she'd paged him, and when he called her, she asked him if he could come home. For a little while. 

When he got here, he asked her why. And she told him. And now she's . . .waiting. 

The girl keeps her face towards her hands, but watches him out of the corner of her eyes, stretching her peripheral vision as far as it can go and keeping it there even if she can't actually see him because of the limits of the human eye, and the skull, and everything else in the way. He hasn't said anything since he got up and went to the window. That was almost five minutes ago. 

"So what do you want to do?" she asks. It's a poor attempt at a casual voice, but it's the best she can do. She asks it in English. She knows her English is accented. She practices, but the accent just doesn't go away. 

The young man turns back to frown at her. It's a frown of thought and maybe of confusion, not of anger, but she can't see his face until she sits up, still putting on a casual act as threadbare and thin as her attempt at tone of voice. By then, he's rubbing his forehead and the frown is smoothing out. It might be for the best. Had she seen the frown, she might not have been able to tell the difference between thoughtful and angry. 

"That's not really . . . the thing," he says. "I mean, that's not the thing that matters." 

It's like his body untwists all at once, from the absolute stillness in the way he stood to a kind of awkward loose grace, the kind you only see on men just barely old enough to be called _men_ without laughing. He shrugs. He drops himself into the worn leather armchair and picks at the scab on one of the scrapes on his arm. When she looks at him in surprise he shrugs. "I mean it's up to you." 

He says this like it's common sense. Like it's the natural conclusion, the only way to think about it. 

"You want to get rid of it, fine," he goes on, "we go find a real doctor in Kiev or, I dunno, hit the States for a week and go to Boston or where there's a nice clinic somewhere, I've got the money. You don't want to, fine, we'll . . ." 

Here he trails off, like he doesn't have any idea what comes after that. At least not right now. The silence is an admission, but not of actual defeat. In the end he sort of waves a hand gracelessly. "I'll figure it out. Whatever." 

She looks at him sidelong for a minute, and now it's her turn to frown from confusion instead of anger. She looks at him while he pats his front pocket and then pushes his shoulders back against the chair and straightens out his back so he can fish the cigarette pack out of the back pocket of his jeans instead. 

While he lights a cigarette from a pack of matches and the smoke starts to swirl up in the sunlight coming from the window, she says, "You mean that." 

He sighs a long stream of smoke out of his nose and leans forward to brace himself on his forearms. "I ever say anything I don't mean? To you, I mean," he adds, like the distinction is important. "I mean," he goes on, not noticing the repetition, "I'm not gonna, it's not - " and he shrugs, looking down at the floor. 

She waits, mostly because she doesn't have any idea where this is going to go. Like he's already so far off-script she can't make up the next scene without something else to go on. He shakes his head and takes another drag on the cigarette. 

When he goes on, it's in the voice of a man giving something up - here, it might be giving up trying to make himself sound better, make what he's about to say sound better than it does. "I'm not dad material, Oksana, you know that, right? You know I'm a shitty boyfriend - " 

The girl seems to be softening, a little, and she interrupts with, "You know I only say that - " 

"Yeah and if you wanted anything else _from_ me, you know it'd be true," he says, waving that off with the cigarette. "I can make sure you got money, a home, you're okay, but I'm still me, and that doesn't make for happy families - you want a white picket fence I can get it for you, but I'm not fit to live there." 

She tilts her head. "You're better than you think you are," she says, and for the first time she seems older than him. Maybe she even feels older than him. He snorts, more smoke punctuating the unspoken point. 

"You know what I mean, Ksenia," he counters. He waits until she meets his eyes, and then she doesn't seem like the older one anymore. Not at all. She nods. 

"I know," she says. She looks down. The hand that moves to her lower abdomen does it in a way that almost seems unconscious. "I don't want to get rid of it." 

He says, "Okay," and then inhales more nicotine-laced smoke. 

It takes a second before the wet in her eyes is obvious enough to glitter in the light, and by then she's already stamped her foot. "God _damn_ it," she says, reverting to Russian. The tension ebbs, and he quietly laughs in more puffs of smoke, as she makes a frustrated, swallowed half-scream and bumps her head against the back of the love-seat. 

He gets up and goes to sit beside her, putting an arm around her shoulders and leaning back against the corner of the love-seat's back and armrest, while she curls in against his side, under his arm. "I'm like a fucking leaking faucet I _hate it_ ," she says, her voice now a low grumble. 

"Getting sick yet?" he asks, kissing the top of her head and she sighs. 

"No," she says, in the same grumbly voice, "just missed . . .two months, and I can smell _everything_ and I'm crying all the time like I'm the baby." She gestures to her face, and then wipes more wet out of the corner of her eye. "I'm serious," she adds, as if she can feel him laughing again, "I cried at a fucking _car commercial_ yesterday. A _car commercial_. I _cried_. I did. _Me._ " 

"See," he says, "now you can tell your brother he can't tell everyone your parents carved you out of ice in the backyard anymore." 

" _Hah_ ," she says. "Fuck my brother. I don't have to tell my brother anything." She rests her head against the front of his shoulder. After a moment, she closes her eyes and groans. "Nnn, my mother's going to drive me crazy," she says. 

"Your mother's going to be so happy she'll spontaneously combust," he corrects, and she gives him a disgusted look. 

"That's what I meant," she adds. She steals his cigarette, takes a drag, and then makes a disgusted face at her hand this time. "And I'm going to have to quit smoking. I know, I know. It's not good. I know." 

"You know what," he says, "I'm gonna leave telling you what to and not to do and eat and what the fuck ever else between you and whatever doctor you don't scare away, okay." She laughs a little, and he kisses her hair again. 

When she wipes her eyes again he asks, "What did you _think_ I was going to say?" His voice is definitely baffled, and maybe a little aggrieved. The girl huffs out a sigh. 

"Oh I don't _know_ ," she says, "I said, I'm a leaking faucet, and Nadya took me to the doctor and you know how Nadya is and she was just - I don't know. I don't know! My brain isn't working right now." 

"That's pretty obvious," he says, halfway to a mutter. She elbows him very gently in the side. 

He says, his voice more serious, "You should go see your mother." 

"Nnn," she says, in a noise of protest that isn't a noise of denial. "But then I'll be in Volgograd for Christmas." 

"Well," he says, shifting position a little, "you wouldn't be here anyway - okay, correction," he says, as she sits up to give him a puzzled frown, "if you were here, you'd be here by yourself. Because I'm gonna be in Prague." 

" _Uchh_ ," she says, her voice full of disbelieving disgust, "why are you going to be in _Prague_?" 

"Because somebody who pissed off Fedorov is going to be in Prague," he says, gently mimicking her. 

"Uchh," she repeats. "Who _now_ \- wait," she adds, and her back straightens, the pose of irritation dissolving into interest, "is this about the guy who shot Roman?" 

He takes out another cigarette. "No," he says, "this is about the guy who ordered the guy to shoot Roman." Her eyes get round and wide. 

"I didn't think they knew who that was yet," she says, startled. He puts the cigarette in his mouth and lights it. 

"Yeah, neither does he," is his reply. 

For a moment, the girl stares into the middle distance, through the arm of the love-seat and the floor beyond, before she blinks a couple times and shakes her head. "Okay then," she says. "Volgograd here I come. I'll call my mother." 

"You could always stay here and spend it with Sergei, Tatiana and Fyodor," he tells her as she gets to her feet, and she pauses in the door to the kitchen to glare at him. 

"You're not funny," she tells him. He grins at her. "Watch it," she says, pointing a mock-threatening finger at him, "or I'll tell my mother that you're going to come through on the way back to pick me up and you really want to stay for a weekend so you can get to know her." 

He holds up both hands in a kind of laughing surrender until she's through the door and out of the line of sight. But he waits until he hears her pick up the phone before he sighs and leans forward again, resting his head in his hands. 

He stays like that for a while.


	3. Chapter 3

It's a nice house. 

It used to be a _very_ nice house, ten years or so back. It's big, encompassing the lot it occupies almost like a dragon curled around its hoard, with the part of the hoard being played by the patio and heated kidney-bean shaped pool. There are hardwood floors, the patio is made from patterned tile, there's a sauna just to one side. When the house had been built, it had clearly been absolute luxury. 

Now the years have passed by and the luxury has worn a little around the edges. There are tiles that have broken and not been replaced. The hardwood could use a polish. The house itself could use a coat of paint. The gardens clearly don't have a gardener anymore and the whole structure looks a little tired, a little like an aging beauty who either uses too much makeup, or not enough. But given where it started, even with all of that, it's a nice house. 

Or: it would be a nice house, if not for the mess. There's clearly been some kind of party, or maybe some kind of war. But probably a party. 

Only a little of the mess shows where the house faces the road: a handful of empty beer-bottles, someone's shoes. Round the corner of the house, though, or open the front door, and the mess presents itself for inspection. It's the mess of a party that went on too long, too hard, with too much alcohol, too much cocaine, too much desperate celebration that isn't really all that joyful. It's the mess of the kind of party people throw when they need to drown out all the ways they aren't okay. This house has seen a lot of that kind of party. It's seen a lot of this kind of mess. 

The house has seen worse, in fact: this time, the mess is giving it a good try, but it's only mediocre. It's spread up the stairs and into the formal dining room and the little closet for the toilet as well as the bathroom beside it. It's conquered the kitchen, and the young man curled in the corner, fortunately snoring to save anyone the terrible moment of wondering whether or not he's dead. There's a mannequin from a clothing store in the pool, along with several sets of clothing. A couple is sleeping on a lounging chair, without any clothing at all but curled under towels used as blankets. The other rooms of the first floor are much the same, although at least one bathroom doesn't bear looking into. 

But it's only made a few sorties into the third floor, and its occupation of the second-floor halls that lead to bedrooms is tentative. People came here to fall over, not to party more. It's not so bad here. 

Though that's maybe not saying much. 

Upstairs in one of the rooms least-destroyed, a young man wakes up. There's a car horn blaring underneath the window that faces the front of the house. A car horn blaring a _lot_ , repeatedly, and - eventually - a voice with an American accent to its Russian shouting, _Roberts! I know you're up there and I know it takes less than this to wake you up!_ Then more blasts from the car's horn. 

The young man lies still and thinks about how much he doesn't want to be conscious. After a moment the young woman behind him pushes on his shoulder and says, "God, wake up and make the American go away." 

"Yeah," the young man says, "yeah okay, I'm going." 

There is no American accent to his Russian, even groggy and slurred. There hasn't been for a very long time. Only a few people remember a time when he had an accent: he got rid of it as fast as he could. He's like that. 

He's in a bed, naked and under the covers. He even has a pillow. The young woman in the bed beside him is just as naked as he is, and curses him without much weight behind it as he rolls out of the bed and lets the warm air out from under the covers while he's at it. She tucks herself back underneath for all of ten seconds before cursing again. She throws back the covers, crawling all the way out and throwing the first t-shirt she finds on the floor over her head, and goes to find the water-closet. 

The young man goes to the window that looks out over the front of the house and after a false start gets it open so he can shout, "Yeah, okay Mike, I hear you, shut the fuck up already before everyone here murders me okay?" in English down to the man standing beside a car that has its window open, so that the man can lean into it to hit the horn. 

"Hey, look at that, you are still alive," the man shouts back up, also in English. The young man winces at the sunlight. 

"Yeah, if you say so," he says. "What'd'you want, Mike?" He pauses and adds, "How the fuck did you even know I was here?" 

"I'm magic," the man named Mike calls back. "Get some clothes on and get out here, Tommy, I want to talk to you." 

The young man called Tommy squints at him for a long moment, looking less hung-over - or at least less muddled by it - than he did just a second ago. Then he says, "Yeah, sure, you're buying me coffee, and it's gonna take me a minute," and pulls the window closed. 

The young woman's back, sitting on the bed and fishing a cigarette out of the pack she's found somewhere. With the scowl of the headache-sufferer, the young man squints around at the floor and the dresser and the arm-chair and the other places that various bits of clothing ended up and then pulls a pair of men's underwear off the lamp to pull on. 

He is lean, with a body that shows use instead of attention to appearance; he's good-looking in an invisible, forgettable kind of way, without the kind of striking human beauty that etches itself in the mind, and without any single compelling feature to remember him by. The only thing that might strike an observer, as he dresses, is that in spite of the hangover - or possibly just continuing intoxication, poisons not yet filtered out of his blood by his liver - his balance is perfect. He winces and grimaces, but he never stumbles or totters. Just gets his underwear on.

When he's done, he turns his puzzled scowl on the woman and makes a vague gesture in her direction. Whoever's shirt she grabbed to run down the hall in, it's not his. It would be too big. 

"Do I know you?" he asks her, as she exhales a stream of smoke. She shakes her head in a way that says _nah, don't worry about it_ and then she holds up the packet of cigarettes. 

His answer is silent but still an emphatic _yes_ , the kind of expression that adds _please god_ , so she tosses him first the pack and then the lighter she used to light her own. 

"Okay," he says, as if going down a list, "so do I owe you anything? Cuz I'm about to disappear," and now she looks amused. 

"Nah," she says. If a person were to look closely, they might put a faint question-mark over the description _young_ ; if a person were to look closely, they might see the signs of a woman pushing into her fourth decade, well-preserved and well-made-up and still with the trappings of a younger woman, because in her field a younger woman gets better pay. The faintest markings of that age can be seen in the corners of her eyes and the centre of her brows, and a careful observer might be able to guess at how much the balance between the bright, genuine smile and the anxious frown has walked the knife-edge, in her life. 

The young man doesn't seem to be that careful observer. He doesn't seem to care, except for the faint sense of not wanting to leave without things squared up. He lights a cigarette and snags his shirt with his foot to drag it into arm's reach. 

The woman twists her hair up at the back of her head; she's a bleached blonde, the roots just starting to show. She sticks something through the knot - maybe a pen, maybe something else - and this time she blows the stream of smoke directly at him. 

"Didn't come here with you," she tells him, "and you were actually pretty fun. Sweet of you to ask, though." 

It's hard to tell if the young man noticed the other shape in the bed before she said that or if he's just quick on the uptake, but he's already pointing to it by the time she's said the last word. The woman leans over and flicks the covers back from the face of a man about the same age as him, with pock-marks on his cheeks and a black beard. He's still deeply asleep, open-mouthed and drooling slightly. 

At the other young man's look of mild disgust and his gesture, the young woman looks even more amused, but flips the covers back over the face. 

The young man has to retrieve his jeans from behind the dresser. There's a _clunk_ sound as something heavy falls from the man's belt to the floor. He picks up the pager, squints at the read-out and swears in English under his breath. Then he pulls his jeans on and his scowl deepens as he contemplates the man still sleeping. 

The young woman just keeps smoking. Her expression now is speculative and expectant, as if she's interested to see what he says or does next. 

"Tell him whatever happened last night I don't want to talk about it," the young man says eventually, pointing at the sleeping man, "and don't tell him I told you but whatever you settled on, he can afford at least twice that and you should absolutely take him for it. _And_ make him buy you like at least three meals. Nice ones. You know if there's a phone anywhere?" 

Now the woman's outright entertained, and not bothering to hide it. She points out the door and crooks her wrist. "Down the hall, third room," she says. "What's your friend want, anyway?" 

"No idea," the young man says, "but he better buy me some good fucking coffee." 

 

There is a phone in the room down the hall, but there are also four people, so the young man moves through the room without making a sound, picks up the phone, lets out the cord and takes it out into the hallway before dialling. Nobody wakes up. He didn't expect them to. He leans on the wall while it rings. 

When a female voice answers, he says, "Hey sweetheart," and the woman's voice rapidly explodes into a line of profanity and vulgarity about twenty seconds long, one that strongly implies his choice of sexual partners is much more interesting than it actually is, and the practices way more athletic. And in some cases physically impossible. 

" - Jesus _fucking_ Christ," she finishes, "are you _trying_ to make me turn grey before I turn twenty-five?" He winces, or half-winces and half smiles, leaning on his forearm over his head. 

"Yeah, I know," he says. "Sorry. Apparently it got pretty exciting here last night. I'm totally sure I seriously meant to call you the minute I got here, but then vodka happened. A lot of it." He pauses. "Possibly that shit Fyodor's gramma makes. I was probably in more danger from the vodka than the job, though." 

"I hate you," she says, in the voice of someone who doesn't mean it at all. "I haven't even had a _beer_ in three months." But she barrels right on to, "Why are you even awake, then? And don't pretend it was because you remembered you needed to call me and make sure I knew you weren't _dead_ , I'll know you're lying." 

"Some guy I know is outside, wants to talk to me about something," he tells her. "Really wants to talk to me about something. Hammering the fucking horn and shouting a lot and shit. And no, I don't think he's going to kill me, and no, I don't really know what he wants, but I do know he won't go away and stop abusing his fucking horn until I come out and at least tell him to fuck off to his face, so hey, here I am, awake. So you know, I am definitely suffering for my fucking indiscretions, if it helps." 

"Do you even remember what happened last night?" she asks, with the amused enjoyment of hangover pain displayed most often by girlfriends and wives, usually when for some reason they don't get to share it. 

"Yeah, no," says the young man, with total bald honesty. "I mean like it started with Yuri being really, really fucking happy about how things went and then I think I lost around 500 bucks to . . . someone. And then there was a lot of vodka. Nothing else, though. This is definitely just alcohol hangover." 

She's laughing at him now, which is at least better than the swearing the call started with. He rubs the back of his neck carefully. "The house didn't burn down. I don't think anyone's dead. Woke up in the same bed as Alexi and his professional date. That's all I know." 

"Did she charge you?" the woman asks and he makes a face. 

"You know, a normal girlfriend would not find that shit so funny," he says, in a mock-sulk that's the kind that comes from letting her score a point. She laughs again, this time almost a satisfied cackle. "Also I remember nothing so I don't even know if there was anything to charge _for_." 

"Bet you asked, though," gets tossed back at him and he makes a face. 

"That's besides the point." 

"You are the worst boyfriend," the woman's voice says fondly. "I knew you were an alley cat when we _met_ , and I'm not the kind of stupid girl who thinks she can change that. I just get all the presents and the cuddles and the compliments. Start giving those to other girls and I'll cut their throats. And your throat." 

"You'll get as far as the first slice," he retorts dryly, "and then get upset about the blood on your shoes." 

"That's all you know," she says, this time aloof and haughty. "Go see your friend and call me again when you're more awake." 

From the background he hears an older woman's voice calling something, and the woman on the phone relates, "My mother wants you to know you are irresponsible and cruel." 

"On the other hand at least I'm not your brother," he retorts, and the woman makes a bit of a gasp. 

"Ooh I am not passing that along, that's mean," she says. It's mostly joking, but there's an edge of warning. "Go, seriously. Don't throw up in your friend's car, that's impolite." 

"Yes dear," he says, in English and a bit theatrical. Then they hang up. 

Another girl he doesn't recognize stumbles out of the room the phone comes from, in her underwear and someone's shirt. She pushes her hair out of her morning-after makeup-raccoon eyes. "Oh god, do you have more of those? Please have more of those," she asks, pointing at his cigarette. He shrugs, and points to the room he came from. 

"Chick who came with Alexi's the one who gave me one. If you don't hate each other she might share." The girl's face lightens in relief and she stumbles in that direction, calling _Sasha give me a fucking cigarette before I die, I will die right on top of you and I'll throw up before I do it._

So he figures they must be friends. 

He looks at himself, as if to check and make absolutely sure he's got his clothes on, checks for his wallet and his pager, swears under his breath and then veers in the direction of the stairs down to the front door. 

 

The young man drops himself into the passenger seat. The older man's already sitting in the driver's seat, with the car engine on and muffled sound from the radio turned down low enough that it's just a kind of white noise. 

"Whaddya want, Mike?" the young man ask. His English comes in a kind of slouched-not-quite-drawl, the drawl of a native-speaker making a point, making their language as lazy and informal as possible, the kind that deliberately borders on insolence. The accent is faintly North-Central American, working-class, and right now just a little bit exaggerated for effect. 

He doesn't put on his seatbelt. Somewhere between the upstairs hallway and the car he's gotten hold of a whole pack of cigarettes and a pack of matches, as well as finishing the cigarette the woman he woke up with gave him or losing it some other way. Out here in the daylight, the faint bruise on his right cheek is visible. 

"You know," the driver says, pulling away from the house as the young man pulls out a cigarette and puts it in his mouth, "those things'll kill you." 

"Mike, I like you and all," the young man says, "but you do not get to drag me outta bed when I'm this hungover and then complain about me smoking. Or do a health PSA. You're way too smart to be my fuckin' gym teacher, trust me. And so is this cigarette, so don't let it go to your head." 

"You sure you're hungover, and not still drunk?" the older man asks, with a half smile. He keeps his eyes on the road. 

"Nope," the younger man says, easily, but doesn't follow the thread any further. Instead he asks, "Seriously, Mike. What do you want so bad you drove all the way here and were an asshole to a bunch of hungover assholes for it?" 

The driver settles himself into his seat and shifts to steering with one hand. "You know," he says, conversationally, "I'm a bit touched by the trust. You haven't even asked where we're going." 

The young man gives him a sideways look that's more alert than he's shown yet. It's also darkly amused, and has a bitter edge. 

"Yeah Mike," he says, patiently, "my friend, you can try the subtle menace all you like. You might even fool some people." 

"Not you?" 

The young man rolls down his window enough for the passage of air to suck the smoke out and traces the edge of the car ceiling with his finger. "You dribble honourable nature on the floor. It puddles around your feet. I'm more worried about Ksenia's mom trying to kill me than you. A lot more, that woman has a fucking mean streak." 

He doesn't say _Mike you're not stupid enough to think you'd be the one to walk away from a you-or-me moment_. More importantly, his body doesn't say it for him - there's no change in the relaxed, resentful slouch he sits in, no shift to the tension needed to respond to violence quickly. In a way, that says all there is to say, louder than if he'd said it in words. With an added rider about the value of their congenial relationship. 

The driver looks thoughtful. "I think you're still drunk," he tells his passenger, who rolls his eyes. 

"Are you going to tell me what you want or not?" the young man demands, with a show of patience. "I mean Ksenia told me not to throw up in your car because it's rude, but fuck man, you keep running me around and I might forget." 

The driver takes a deep breath. "Well, first I want to go get some coffee, and then I want to talk to you for a bit. We'll find somewhere to park." 

The look and the faint sigh the younger man gives him are almost too young for his twenty-something years, but he doesn't object. 

 

They go to a Coffee Bean and drink their coffee in the shop, talking about innocuous things. They're unremarkable. If it's clear the young man's coming off a rough night, well: it's not like the place hasn't seen people with hangovers before. A lot. It's not like there's blood on his clothes, or his skin. At least, not blood you could find without a microscope, or Luminol. 

He gets a second coffee to go, which the older man pays for. They get back in the car, and the older man drives for a while, seemingly aimless, like a meandering and slightly tedious tour of the city's less interesting streets. 

Both of them are quiet until the car's settled and parked behind a building that would look abandoned except for the cars in the lot behind it. 

It's in the process of being abandoned. That means the cars that park there are often different, unpredictable, as different people come to strip the last few things out of the space, or to take stock of what's going to be needed to tear it down. Or borrow it for less savoury purposes, maybe. Hard to tell, if you don't know who's got the keys. It means one more car there isn't going to draw attention, even if people sit in it for a while. 

"Alright, Mike," the young man says, slouching almost pointedly in the passenger seat so he can rest one foot on the dash. There's a slight edge to his voice now that says he's done being patient. "What'd'y' _want_?" 

The words are slurred one into the other, the English still lazy and sloppy. Like he's making that point again, whatever that point happens to be. 

As an answer, the man named Mike reaches over to the glove compartment and opens it. Inside there's an expanding folder, manila, nondescript, big enough to hold probably three times as much as a simple file-folder. He pulls it out and hands it to the younger man. 

There is a very simple, clean-lined logo in the centre, a serifed M and W interlocking so that the centre makes a diamond-shaped shield. Underneath is printed WHYTE in a bold serifed script. 

"I want to offer you a job," he says.

The way the young man says, "Fuck you," is clearly defensive, automatic, knee-jerk, abrupt. It's a response without thought, and the older man is already replying before it finishes. 

"Look at the goddamn thing, Clint," he says, raising his voice a little and driving it through. "Just take the stuff out and look at it. Read it." 

It's not the name the younger man used at the house. It's not a name he answers to here (in this city, in this country, on this continent), or would even admit he answers to anywhere. He's better at that than most people would expect: someone could shout that name, the whole name, at the back of his head in a crowd and he wouldn't even twitch. Wouldn't give any sign that it meant anything more to him than if someone shouted "Bob Telly!" or some other pure nonsense. 

In a crowd, he'd ignore it. With most people, face-to-face, he'd react the way anyone would, if someone were to use a name that wasn't theirs and they'd never heard of, and act like it belonged to them - start with confused, move to annoyed, and beyond. 

Here, in this car, he just fixes the older man with an intensely hostile look and repeats, "Fuck _you_ ," this time putting the emphasis on the second word. Here, in the car, he acknowledges his ownership of the syllable, of four consonants and a vowel, in a way that says he's _clearly_ not happy about it. 

But he does open the dossier and pull out the first sheet of paper - a letter - and the booklet underneath. He reads the sheet first, and then flips open the booklet's cover, folding it and each successive page over behind as he finishes them. He reads faster than most people would expect. 

The man named Mike turns the radio on. He flicks through stations until apparently he manages to find one he can stand and leaves it there, letting the chatter of an interview fill the car and fill in the silence. His companion reads through the documents without a word. 

For a while, that's all that happens, the younger man reading and the older man listening to the back and forth on the radio with a slight listening frown on his face. Then the young man - who doesn't normally answer to _Clint_ \- drops the booklet he's been reading and leans back. 

"You know I know you're CIA," he says, and his tone is casual. The other man smiles slightly, like a person smiles at something that's only amusing because it's over. 

"Ex," he corrects. "Ex-CIA." 

His companion snorts. "Is anybody _actually_ ex-CIA?" he demands, drily, resting his arm against the bottom of the car-window and tracing the top with one finger. 

"Yeah," says the man named Mike. "Me. I only worked for them, and I did it for pretty specific reasons. One of them," and he jabs a finger at the stuff on the other man's lap, but without any force or spite, "was this. You need a certain kind of reputation to do what I want to do, and there aren't that many ways to get it. You need to know a certain set of people, and you need them to know you. I did a job I didn't mind, and it was a job that let me put together what I needed for this. That's all." 

The young man gives him an appraising look, the kind that isn't actively disbelieving or incredulous, but also doesn't give any sense of where the person giving it has decided to rate what they're hearing when it comes to the bullshit meter. 

Then he shrugs. "I'm not big on charity, Mike, and I'm not real interested in a saviour," he says, but at that Mike cuts him off with an actual guffaw of laughter. 

"Christ, Barton, the only thing you need saving from is boredom," he says, "don't make me laugh. You know I used to work for the Company?" he goes on, giving the younger man a steady, level, but also amused look. " _I_ know a man your age who can take out that asshole Stepulev without leaving a damn trace isn't gonna find anything to keep him interested working for these mid-level creeps." 

The young man snorts. "That's a new one," he says, derisive, and he means Mike's not-an-accusation. He doesn't elaborate, just looks disdainful, and the man named Mike cracks half a smile. 

" _And_ you're a damn good liar," he says. "I know you killed Stepulev, Clint. CIA doesn't, because I didn't tell them. I probably couldn't prove it in a court of law, either, even around this place - not without a shitload of corroboration, and nobody's gonna give me that. I don't have any interest in doing so, either. Shit like Stepulev shouldn't stick around and dirty the air for the rest of us. But I know about Stepulev, I know about Nikolevsky and I'm pretty damn sure about Orlov and if you decide to trust me I'd really like to hear how you managed that, because I still can't fucking figure it out. I'm not offering you charity. I'm offering you a job because you'd be a damn useful asset _and_ frankly someone with your abilities messing around with these bottom feeders is a waste." 

His younger friend's face hasn't actually moved out of its portrait of _are you fucking serious?_ but the man named Mike ignores that. "And I know you're not gonna go any higher here," he adds, "because firstly you'd have to draw attention to yourself and you don't like doing that, and secondly you'd have to swim in shit that's deeper than you want to wade into." 

The statement isn't a warning, or a speculation; the man lays it down like the kind of fact even small children know, like how the sky is blue and gravity works. He isn't telling his friend anything new, isn't letting him know about a future danger. He's just making something they both know explicit, pulling it out in the open. 

"Now if this company's going to be what I want it to be," he goes on, "I need people with particular skills, and sets of skills. I also need people more than one brain-cell to rub together, people with the _people_ skills to manage and anticipate other human beings, and people who have the experience and basic common sense needed to judge every aspect of a given situation - including the ethics. Someone who manages to arrange the world so low-level scum pay him money to take out three miserable pieces of shit? Yeah, Barton, I'd like to sign on a few of those." 

By now, Barton's incredulity has shifted to a blank, unreadable face as he watches Mike - the kind of face that admits that some thought is going on behind the blank wall, but refuses to even hint at what kind of thought that might be. He doesn't react with amusement, or disbelief, or anything else - not even to the word _ethics_. He just considers. Silently. 

In the silence, the chatter of the radio show - never actually gone - squeezes back in, taking the chance bloom into the available space. It seems jarringly loud, despite being completely drowned out only seconds before. 

Eventually, the man called Mike asks, "How the hell did you manage with Stepulev, anyway?" 

The radio host talks for a while, again. Just that voice. For a while. 

There's no sign on the younger man's face of what he's thinking, or what he's decided, before he actually says, "Wooden arrow from a seventy-pound draw recurve bow, from the fire-escape next door. Took the arrow back and burned it." 

It's flat and unconcerned, like he was explaining a reasonable recipe he got from a magazine. Mike's reaction is _not_ that kind of reaction. At all. 

" . . .you are fucking shitting me," is what the older man says, staring at the other for a good twenty seconds. Clint shrugs. "A fucking recurve bow. From _there_." 

"My family couldn't afford cable when I was growing up," the younger man says, dryly, "and we had fuck all to do in town. Movie theatre even burned down when I was fucking . . . fourteen? But my brother stole a couple crappy bows from a summer camp one year and showed me how to work one. It was that, or light fires, sell drugs and sleep around the neighbourhood girls like the rest of my cousins." He shrugs. "Shooting squirrels, raccoons and other shit in the woods by our house didn't get me arrested or end up with some girl's brother trying to beat my head in. I didn't exactly like homework, either. That'll give you a lot of time to learn how to pull off trick-shots."

"You have the same aim with a firearm?" Mike demands, and Clint shrugs again. 

"Handguns and .22, sure. Never had the chance to fuck around with anything more interesting." He doesn't sound that excited about the prospect. At Mike's look, he shrugs. "Guns are loud, they reek, all they do is put little piece of metal through people. They have their place but they're limited. Kinda boring, honestly." 

"And you're confused about why I want to hire you," Mike says, and Clint shrugs one more time. 

"I'll think about it," is what he tells the older man. 

"You know how to get hold of me," the older man replies, leaving it at that. He knows when not to push his luck. 

 

Two days pass, before the man called Mike finds a note slipped under his door, before the note means he's there to pick the younger man up at the corner of this street and that avenue, at this time. Alone. 

The younger man drops into the passenger seat of the car with the same graceless grace he used before, and says, without preamble, "Ksenia's pregnant. Four months. Need to move her and her mom to the US and make them invisible before I go anywhere, or do fuck all." 

"Her brother?" the older man asks, taking the sudden revelation in stride better than most would - and not because it doesn't come as much as a shock to him as it would to anyone else. The secret has been well kept. Everyone knows the girl went back to her mom in Volgograd, but word is, it's because her mom's sick and her brother's done something stupid. Nobody figured her for pregnant. 

"Fuck her brother," the younger man says, matter-of-fact and terse. He lights a cigarette. "Her brother isn't a fucking factor." 

Mike nods slowly. The look he gives his passenger says he knows there's a lot gone unsaid there, but it also says he's going to leave it and take him at his word. "Your kid, I'm assuming," Mike says, just to make sure. 

"Biologically, yeah," the younger man, who doesn't normally answer to Clint, replies. "I'm not worth shit as a dad, though. We've already talked about it. It's fine. Set her up and send her money, we're good." 

"Shouldn't be hard," Mike replies. He's already lining up the people he needs to ask. Two women, one of them pregnant, shouldn't be too hard to sell. 

"Without a fucking trail hanging over her head or mine?" Clint asks, bluntly. Mike doesn't rise to the tone. 

"You got liquid assets ready to hand?" Mike replies and Clint snorts. 

"I only look stupid with money," he says. 

"No problem, then," Mike says. "Money," he adds, in a philosophical kind of tone, "is the world's great leveller." 

"Ain't that the fucking truth," his younger friend replies. "Then alright, fine. Still on offer, I'll sign on, see if you live to regret it." He's almost good enough to pass that off as indifference, to hide the fact that even this much is hard for him. To hide the agitation. 

"Not a chance in hell, Barton," the man named Mike replies, smiling slightly. "Not a chance in hell."


	4. Chapter 4

There is a hospital room. 

It's a nice hospital. The room is private. The man who lies in the bed is down both legs below the knee, has a bad burn - about the size of two thumbs - on his right cheek, and is missing most of one ear. He's dozing, the book he'd been reading before turned pages-down on his chest. A small portable CD player beside him is playing something classical. The remains of supper are still on his tray, pushed aside. 

His beard is that of a man who normally trims it close and neatly but who hasn't had the opportunity in a while. His hair gives the same impression. Bruises are fading on his face and the bare arms visible under the Y-back undershirt he wears instead of the standard hospital gown. The blankets are pulled up to his waist. He has an IV, the kind for morphine that the patient controls. 

When the second man comes to the door of the room, the one in the bed doesn't open his eyes right away, but he does say, "You know, Agent Coulson, I am absolutely sure this is outside of visiting hours. You sure you should be abusing the privileges of rank like this?" 

The man in the doorway is younger than Mike by about ten years. He's dressed in what happens when you start out the morning in a well-pressed suit and then slowly surrender to the elements and the exigencies of a stressful day until now, just after sunset, he's less both jacket and tie, with his sleeves rolled up and collar undone. 

His face had been thoughtful, tending towards a frown, as he stepped up to the door; now he half smiles and shows the crows-feet just beginning around his eyes, put there by a generous helping of previous smiles. 

"How are you feeling?" he asks, coming into the room and taking the chair from the little table by the window. He turns it around, so when he sits he straddles the back of it, and the movement, gesture and posture are all at least a decade younger than he is. But they're still comfortable. He leans his forearms on the back of the chair. 

The man in the bed snorts. "Half of both my legs are gone. Morphine's great. Most of my ear's gone and for some reason - " his hand goes up to stop just short of touching the space, " - that's throwing me more than the legs." Then the wry, cranky humour fades and he says, quieter, "Five of my people are dead. And we'll never get their bodies back to their families." 

"I know," the other man says, tone quieter, and openly regretful. "I'm sorry." 

"All in all I've been better, Phil," the injured man says. "I have been better." He shakes off the quiet like a dog shaking off water and says, "On the other hand I'm alive, which probably counts as a miracle. How in the name of Christ did that kid end up finding _you_ , anyway?" 

The one he called Phil raises both eyebrows. "'Kid'?" he says, tone somewhat disbelieving, but the other waves that away with an irritable hand. 

"I've known him since before he could buy a beer," he says, with the crankiness born of pain and fatigue. "Legally, anyway. He'll be 'kid' till we're both dead. Don't dodge the question. Just say you can't tell me if you can't." 

Phil's mouth twitches towards a smile, but only just barely, before he suppresses it. "He didn't find me on purpose," he replies. "He broke into the Company-owned tailor-shop and apartment we've been using for a joint operation and had a heated exchange with their agent on the desk. I just smoothed out some wrinkles." 

Maybe surprisingly, the injured man chuckles softly, though it sounds like an effort. "Jesus Christ," he says, but he is smiling. "Did he shoot anyone before you stepped in to imitate an iron?" 

"No," the man called Phil replies. "Though he was threatening. If I recall correctly, the Company man asked him what he thought he was going to do, shoot his way through everyone in the building - he said he was game, they could see who died last. I got the impression," he goes on, over more of the injured man's soft laughter, "he'd had a trying few days." 

"Yeah Clint doesn't really lose his sense of humour," the injured man says. "Ever, really. But it does get pretty razor-edged and nasty as the stress starts to get to him." He gives the other man a shrewd look. "And I'm going to guess since he isn't here annoying the nursing staff and nobody's mentioned him being more injured than I am - or dead - that you've sent him and one of your people back in that hell-hole to sort out whatever it is you were doing here before the bombs went off." 

The one he called Phil says, blandly, "I have no idea what you're talking about, Mike." Which is as good as an admission. 

"Yeah, thought so," Mike says. He looks at the ceiling. "What's it like out there?" 

Phil sighs. "Tucumán is still under siege, if that's the right word. More like a hostage negotiation - everyone's waiting for the men inside to realize they've already lost and give up without hurting anyone else." 

"Give good odds?" the injured man, Mike, asks, with the same shrewd look as before. The man named Phil shakes his head. 

"No," he says. "No, there's something wrong with these ones, Mike. If we're lucky they'll fight like cornered rats and die that way, but if not they might do something unfortunate so they can go out with a bang." 

"And yet you're back here in Florida talking to me," the man called Mike says. "Not SHIELD's problem?" 

The one he called Phil shrugs. "SHIELD's presence in Argentina was strictly advisory, and the operation's purpose was gathering intel on a situation that no longer pertains," he says. "The last of our people should be wheels-up in twenty minutes. Your guy'll be with them," he adds. 

"What about the guy who hid us, the carpenter, Pereyra - him and his daughter?" Mike asks, frowning. "Damn, I should've asked about them - " 

"Your employee was - _vehement_ ," Phil says, as if trying out the word. "Let's go with _vehement_ , about their being given asylum and support. We brought the daughter back on the same plane as you, since she was already there, and Pereyra will be on the plane with my people and Barton. There's an aunt and cousin in Buenos Aires we're extracting as we speak." 

Mike's eyebrows go up. "Jesus Phil, what the hell was in Tucumán that Clint could make that kind of demand?" 

Once again the other man's tone turns as bland as unseasoned white chicken. "SHIELD is always extremely appreciative of any aid given to our agents and our operations, and sensitive to the risks local individuals take in giving it." 

Mike snorts, and then winces. At Phil's look he shrugs. "Hurt my ear drum, or something," he says, gesturing to his mostly-missing ear. "God help me when I sneeze." 

"What's your prognosis?" 

The injured man shrugs, and then sighs. "I should be able to move to at-home care in a few days, they said," he replies. "And then it's all physio shit to get used to prosthetics, maybe, or a chair, or fucked if I know - that and the muscle loss on this side - ended up taking out a strip up to here because of the infection," he adds, drawing a line on his right leg from mid-thigh up to his hip, "can't see it now but frankly it's creepy to look at and always gonna be - and I get to decide if I want to be the one-eared wonder or get some plastic surgery done with that. On the one hand it does affect how you hear direction and stuff," Mike notes, "but on the other, it's more goddamn surgery." 

He seems to notice the book face-down on his stomach and closes it, reaching over to drop it on the bedside table. 

"If what you're asking is whether I'll be going back to work, the answer's no," he says, folding his hands across his upper abdomen instead. "I'm too old for this shit, I know losing Torres and Gorecki and Rolf and Barnard and Adams is going to hit pretty damn hard just as soon as I'm trying not to ignore pain all the time, I've got to learn how to fucking walk again or decide it's not worth it and embrace life in a chair, and I'd rather cut it off here with a miraculous escape, a triumphantly saved client and a good story than try to go back and watch it all fizzle out because I'm too stupid to know when it's over. Sorry," he says, with an attempt at humour, though it's grim. "You'll have to cultivate someone else you can trust not to shit where you eat when you need some extra hands." 

"I'll figure something out," his friend replies, smiling slightly. "I think you're right, if it helps. And you also _did_ everything right, if _that_ helps. These bastards were fanatics, nobody even knew they existed last week, nobody could've seen it coming. You and your people got the consul and his family out and they're fine, and last I heard agitating for some kind of decoration for you and yours. Hazards of the field." 

"'Time and chance happen to them all'," the injured man says, drawing a hand down his face. "Yeah and my nephew'll be quoting that damn verse at me every time I call for the next six months at least. It won't help much when it sets in, though." He takes a deep breath and then frowns thoughtfully at his visitor. "You've still got a look like you want to know something, though." 

There's a wealth of question underneath the observation, more than the obvious, and the way the visitor shifts to settle in his seat and the serious look on his face implies that he's answering all of it, or admitting something, or something along those lines. 

"Barton," he says. Mike's eyebrows rise again. "If you were keeping the company I know where he'd be, he's made that pretty clear. Given you're not, what's he going to do?" 

Mike exhales in a thoughtful huff, looking at the ceiling. "Go freelance," he says. "Or get out, but I'm not sure what he'd do then. Probably freelance." 

"He won't sign on with someone else?" Phil asks, and Mike laughs. 

"God, no. Barton only worked for me because we go back and I managed to convince him my head wasn't shoved up my ass and I wasn't going to pull any bullshit." 

"Problems with authority?" Phil suggests and this time Mike's short chuckle is a bit dry. 

"Barton doesn't have any problems with authority," he replies, tone matching the laugh. "He just doesn't acknowledge anyone else has any, and other people have problems with that. Clint doesn't sort neatly into the boxes most people work with, Phil," he says, giving his friend a level look as the laughter drops out of his voice. "Most people sort everyone into follower, or leader, or team player, or loner, and it just doesn't work with him - kid works great with a team, if he wants to. Great leadership potential, too, if he wants to, which he mostly doesn't - but only mostly. Best guy you could have at your back, as long as he wants to be there." 

"I'm sensing a common theme," Phil remarks. 

"Yeah, well done," Mike says. "And any time he doesn't want to - whatever it is he doesn't want to - he'll work around it and get out and not really bother about whether you'll like it or not. He'll follow you if he thinks you're worth following, and if and when he doesn't, he'll stop. Hell, he may not even tell you." 

Phil's nodding slightly at the recitation. "What's his background?" 

"Bad family, somewhere in the Midwest," Mike says. "Runaway as of about seventeen, got into some trouble he won't talk about in Philadelphia, left the US around nineteen or twenty. I met him in Moscow when I was contracting for the CIA. There was a bit of a mess happened with some of the low-levels there, a friend of his was looking like collateral - except Clint figured out the friend knew stuff we'd have a use for, having figured us out about two months before. And properly, too - not the stupid contractor excuse for a cover the assholes came up with, though he didn't push the point." 

Mike shrugs. "We moved his friend somewhere safe, friend gave us what we needed to handle a particular threat, idiot in charge of that whole sector assumed it was all just lowlife crap, I started paying attention to the American kid who fit in with the rest of them like a dead chicken in a maggot factory and looked like he had nothing on his mind beyond his next beer and next lay, and was still managing to stay unaffiliated with anybody but on good terms with just about everybody, exactly where he wanted to be." 

"Any bad blood?" is the next question, but Mike shakes his head. 

"Nah," he says. "He keeps up a few contacts back there, I know, but nobody thinks anything other than he was a pretty good hired hand who decided to move on to more reliable things. Nothing stuck out of whatever the ugly was in Philly, either, not that I could ever find. If you're thinking of recruiting, Phil, you need to come see me for a longer talk after I'm not on morphine and tired out of my head," Mike adds, and both men know this is code for _not in the hospital, even though I'm pretty sure you're jamming everything for miles_. "But I can tell you this." 

Phil waits, looking inquisitive. 

"I can't say I exactly agree with where he draws all of his lines, when it comes to right and wrong," Mike tells him. "But I can tell you that where they are, he won't cross them for anyone. Not you, not SHIELD, not this country, I'm pretty sure Jesus Christ could appear right in front of him with a host of angels and voice of heavenly command, and Barton'd still flip the Lord Himself off if he didn't like it. 

"And yeah, I'm saying that about someone who didn't have a problem killing people for money," Mike notes, answering the unspoken words in the air. "Like I said - I don't necessarily agree with where his lines are. I don't even necessarily know where all of them are. But I do know he won't cross them." Mike frowns, thoughtfully. "You know that book you lent me a while back, War of the Roses but with dragons and shit?"

His visitor lifts one hand a little, a gesture of acknowledgement, if also looking slightly awkward. 

"That something morgul-something something saying, about how everyone dies eventually. I end up thinking about that one with the kid, sometimes. Like with most of us, I mean - we know it but you got to admit, you always hope you'll be the exception." He chuckles, a little painfully, and his visitor makes a slightly sheepish inclination of the head, another wordless agreement. "But he's actually got it, in his head. Right in the back. He's said it - everyone else laughed, but I don't think he was joking. That mess in Egypt," Mike elaborates. "He was my point man, and when someone said he was crazy, he just said 'everyone dies sometime'." 

"That's a hard thing to live with," the man named Phil observes. 

"Like I said," Mike agrees. "I don't know what he'd do if he got out, so I don't think he will." 

They talk a little while longer, mostly about the situation in Argentina and what the man called Phil thinks is going to happen (or at least can admit he thinks is going to happen), about the attack itself, and then about smaller things. How people they both used to know are getting on, what kind of house the injured man wants to get after he gets out of the hospital and starts planning his real retirement. 

It's been about an hour when Mike starts to doze off, the pause in the conversation sliding into a silence eventually broken by a very soft snore. At that point, his visitor stands up and puts the chair quietly back by the table. Then he pulls the blankets up to cover more of his friend, turns off everything but the bedside light, and leaves, closing the door behind him. 

 

When the patient named Mike wakes up next - properly, not just surfacing enough to push the button for painkillers and float back off - there's a different man in the chair, younger than the previous visitor, in a t-shirt and sweats, with stitches by his temple and on his cheek, a bandage around his left upper arm and right lower arm, and a lot of different bruises and scrapes. 

"Your SHIELD friends are fucking creepy," the man says. "And whatever they were so worried about in Tucumán came out of some gun runner's basement, in case you were wondering. Original case was pretty big, but Mrs Terrifying Competence stripped something out of everything in there and it went into a backpack." 

"Her name's May," Mike says, smiling slightly, not sitting up. "Don't be a dick, Clint, she's a pretty amazing lady." 

"Yeah I figured you'd have a crush," says the man Mike called Clint. Then he leans forward, fishes something out of his back pocket and tosses it onto Mike's stomach. The little bag hits with more force than one might expect. 

Inside there's a watch, a rosary, a round medal with its ribbon and the look of something carried around everywhere in a pocket, an antique-looking engagement and wedding ring set, and a set of wooden prayer beads. Mike's face softens. 

"I got Rolf's little Qu'ran, too, but the spooks are too busy checking to make sure I didn't write anything I wasn't allowed inside it to give it back yet," his visitor says. "You can probably get your buddy to lean on them. Didn't get to keep any legs after all," he adds, gesturing towards the lower half of Mike's body. 

"Yeah I had one of those fun septicaemia spreading red lines things," Mike says wryly, "and I got told considering the spread of the infection and how long it had to settle in and so on, and how fucked up I was otherwise, taking the chance of the infection getting up to the rest of me would make me a fucking moron. So I didn't."

"Ah, well," says the younger man, gesturing to him, "I got . . . call it eighty-two percent of you out alive, that's like a B+." 

"Did you really tell Watson you'd shoot him in the face if he tried to come back and get us?" Mike asks. 

"Nope," says his visitor. "I told him I'd fucking shoot him in his fucking face if he tried to come back and get us. The curses were an important part of the message. How the fuck do you know this SHIELD suit, again?" 

There's a suppressed smile on Mike's face. "He was a Ranger," he says, calmly, and the younger man rolls his eyes. 

"You guys are worse than the fucking Masons," he mutters. 

"When did you sleep last, kid?" 

"I took my last dexedrine like six hours ago," the visitor answers, "who knows, maybe I'll get to sleep sometime this week." 

"Yeah no wonder you're a cranky bitch," Mike retorts. "Go find us some food, kid, I'll get someone to come help me take a piss and then we can talk."


	5. Chapter 5

Imagine a building.

It is big, and abandoned, and empty. Once upon a time it was a buzzing hive of industry, churning out machines needed for farms far away; now it sits derelict, little around it, far enough away from any cluster of population to even keep the desperate from using its crumbling walls for shelter. In front, there were offices; behind, there was manufacture. Now, there is mostly ruin. 

Unlike ruins in other, wealthier places, this place was stripped bare before it was wholly abandoned. There is almost nothing in the building that anyone could have made use of, down to tables and chairs and sometimes parts of the wall, or the wiring, or the plumbing. This makes for many open spaces, plaster crumbling in the weather, tiles falling off the walls of what used to be a reception lobby and now isn't much more than a mess. It is empty, and crumbling, and what animals hide in the spaces here are small and scurrying. Humans don't want the building anymore, but the collection of living things humans misguidedly call "nature" (as if they and what they do were separate from it) hasn't reclaimed much of it yet. There are no plants. No trees growing through the floor. 

There is nothing to fill the void that the absence of humans leaves. There is just the void. This place represents only the failure of human dreams, and offers nothing - yet - of the infinite cycles of the planet. You could make a metaphor of it. But you probably shouldn't. 

Imagine this building at night, in the early part of a northern hemisphere summer, with just enough cloud in the sky to block the moon. 

Now imagine a man. One solitary man. 

He is somewhere between the ages of twenty and thirty, and his complexion is the pale one commonly known as "white" - though not the palest version falling under that name. His hair is an unremarkable brown and cut short. He appears in excellent physical condition. Some people would call him attractive; others would not. It all depends. He wears a black cotton shirt with long sleeves over black pants that have enough pockets in unexpected places to earn the title tactical. His boots are also black. So is the bag he brought with him, sitting on the ground beside his foot. 

He has occupied what used to be the fourth floor, and which might once have been filled with clerks sitting at desks, working industriously under watchful eyes. It seems designed for that. You could imagine that it was filled with those clerks, office-workers, little cogs in a big machine making it all tick away, unnoticed. 

It isn't. It's empty as the rest of the building, forlorn, with the battered pillars in the middle and the mess of the flooring making it seem like there should have been a disaster, when there's only been neglect. Only rain, and sun, and neglect. 

He arrived here in the middle of the day. Between then and now he has salvaged enough wood from somewhere - possibly the walls - to knock up a crude bench, or maybe a table, or maybe both: too tall to be a bench, too narrow to be a table, mostly there (it seems) for him to lean back against and put his coffee mug on, along with the pieces to whatever he's fiddling with. 

And he has made himself coffee, on a small camp stove. And he is fiddling with what might be fletching, for arrows. But sleeker, more refined, less rustic, less antique than the image that most people would come up with for _fletching_ and _arrows_. 

There's a floodlight beside him. It illuminates all of the surrounding empty space quite well. It illuminates the fact that there is more than one space, location, around top of the wall or through a window, that a skilled person might occupy to get a clear, well-lit shot at him. Centre of mass. Head. Either. In fact, there are more than a dozen such spaces. It's incredible to think that he might not know it. 

Beside him on the bench are several weapons, and there are one or two more in the bag. The only thing to hand is the knife he's using, off and on, for the busy-work he's decided to use to pass the time. It's not a weapon, any more than the coffee. He could use it as effectively as the coffee, effectively as anything there might be to hand, but that's not the point: the point is it's a tool, not a weapon. No protection. 

And he passes quite a bit of time with it, before he puts down tool and task, and instead picks up steaming coffee, and takes a drink. 

After a moment he swirls the coffee in his cup, looks down at it. He says, "If you were going to shoot me, you'd've done it already. We both know that." 

He pitches his voice to carry. His Russian is perfect - not perfect in the sense of _flawless_ , but perfect in that it sounds like his native tongue, spoken from the cradle. It sounds like he's always spoken it. It sounds like his mother-tongue. 

Which is to say: his Russian is invisible, full of all the flaws that people who really speak a language always have and even embrace. There are many. His are comfortable, and natural, and worn in, even to a very attentive ear. To hear him, you would think was born there, in Russia, where the language comes from. You would think he grew up in one of its cities, wrapped up in its sounds. In fact, you would think he came from Volgograd. 

He does not come from Volgograd. 

"So the question is," he says, "are we going to have a conversation, or am I just going to keep making myself look crazy by talking to thin air while you get a crick in your neck?" 

The man takes another drink of his coffee. His hand twitches in the habitual motion of someone reaching for a packet of cigarettes in a shirt pocket he doesn't have, but the motion is quickly arrested, with a small, irritable twitch to his mouth. 

"I mean," he goes on, "I'm not going to lie: talking to thin air is always a bit uncomfortable and I'd rather talk to a person, even if the person's going to shoot me after, but I can live with being a bit uncomfortable. Actually I can live with being more than a bit uncomfortable. So it's up to you." 

He pours himself more coffee. He doesn't add anything to it. 

What follows is a very long silence, long enough that a watcher might see the man take a breath in preparation for speaking again, before there's the barest hint of the scrape of a footfall, and the man looks up. 

Now. 

Imagine a girl. 

Her skin is pale, pale as ivory, and her complexion is flawless even without makeup. Her hair is ash blonde - the kind of ash blonde that takes hours and hours of work to replicate when it isn't natural, and hers is not. It has been just long enough since the bleach and subsequent dye-work was done that if you know it's there, you can see the faintest hints of copper-red in the wisps of hair around her face. But only if you know it's there. Know what to look for. If you just saw her on the street, you would think it's her natural colouring. 

It isn't. Obviously. 

Her hair is pulled back into a tight braid, and she's wearing a dark, dark grey, not black. The suit is one piece, zipped up the front, fitted to her skin to keep there from being anything to catch or drag and not to show off the shape of the body underneath - although in her case, it can't help doing that, too. But that's collateral damage, not the target. Like the man's pants, there are pockets here and there. Her footwear is probably best called _boots_ but they're soft-soled and soft-sided. Meant for stealth. 

She emerges from part of the broken ceiling, moving out of shadow onto one of the metal beams. She walks, her balance perfect. Her face is expressionless. The Kahr P380 she has trained on the man is absolutely steady, even after she moves it to one hand so that she can clip something onto the beam. It even remains steady as she crouches, sits and eventually pushes herself off the beam, as wire or rope pays slowly out of the mechanism she clipped on, which she wrapped around her free arm and which finally connects to the belt at her waist. 

As soon as she unfastens that part, her feet now on the ground, she returns to a two-handed grip on the weapon. 

Imagine this girl. 

And she is a girl. Without makeup or expression or part to play, without body-language to imitate or goal to achieve, her age becomes obvious. 

That is, her lack of age becomes apparent. She is maybe as young as sixteen, maybe as old as eighteen. Age, in those years, is hard to tell. She's made it most of the way out of puberty, past what most people think of as the dividing line between child and adult, at least when it comes to the body. But without a part to play, if you know what to look for, you can see the softness in the face, the line of her chin. She is not a woman. She is a girl. 

A girl, but not a child. She could play in either direction, play at being a woman or play at being a child, and watching her here it is clear how: how this posture and that look and those clothes would make her twenty-two, and how something else might make her twelve. 

She is eighteen: right now, unusually, she looks it. More or less. 

The man keeps his hands on his coffee, and completely away from any weapons, and gives her a look that is all polite expectation. A look that is an invitation to determine how the next few moments are going to go. He himself gives no direction. 

The P380 doesn't waver. But after a moment, she says, "You're alone in an isolated location with the target you were sent to eliminate and you're drinking coffee and conspicuously unarmed." 

She says it in English, her accent flawlessly and invisibly American, as invisible as his Russian. Her voice is pleasant to listen to. She finishes with, "A suicidally stupid thing to do." 

The man shrugs. "Like I said: if you were going to kill me, I'd be dead," also in English now. "You're talking to me instead, so that's not how it's gonna be."

He takes a drink before he goes on, conversationally, "And if I wanted to kill you, I'd've put your brains on the mirror behind your chair in that restaurant two nights ago. So since neither of us is going to kill each other right now and your arms have got to be getting tired, go ahead and put that down. Coffee?" 

Her eyes widen, at the words about the mirror. But only infinitesimally. They visibly narrow at the offer of coffee. "Explain," she says, now in Russian again and clipped to a razor-edge. "Or I will shoot you." 

The man looks at her for a few seconds, and then he sighs. He puts the coffee down on the board beside him and folds his arms. The move is gently defensive; it's clear he knows it. He still does nothing to change it. 

"You are Natalia Alianovna Romanova," he tells her, gently. "You were born in 1984, in November, which makes you eighteen years old. You've been operational as an assassin and covert operative since you were fourteen, working for a rogue agency that used to be Soviet and now doesn't answer to anyone, but still tells _you_ that you're working for the greater glory of blah blah what the fuck ever, I'll bet. Actually," he corrects himself, taking a slow breath and letting it out, "your first mission was July, so call it thirteen. And before last year you'd killed eighteen people." 

The girl's face had been expressionless; now it is blank, empty, wooden, except for the widening of her eyes. The man goes on, "And then last year you burned down the children's wing at a hospital in São Paulo," and his voice is even and isn't any quieter, but is somehow gentler, "and now you don't sleep at night, probably because every time you close your eyes you can hear the screaming."

He keeps his gaze steady on her. "And when you can't sleep it gives you too many quiet hours to think and that's the last thing anyone ever wanted someone like you to have, because you're way too fucking smart not to see how nothing they've fed you actually makes any goddamn sense, once you take a look out at the real world. And you've seen it. And you know their bullshit doesn't make any goddamn sense. And you're starting to hit the point where you can't tell yourself anything else." 

The girl swallows, convulsively. The man unfolds his arms and leans his hands against the board, leans back on them. "That night at the restaurant I got the waiter to give you a message; next day you found me at my hotel and tailed me for the rest of the day, tonight you're here. You're really fucking good at what you do. You shouldn't've come here; you should've contacted your handler or your other superiors and told them I tried to make contact, and how. You didn't do that. You came here instead. I miss anything?" 

"The Americans sent you," she says, her voice only slightly harsh, still maintaining her shot. 

"SHIELD did," he says, and she snorts at the minor correction. "There is a difference," he says, mildly. "Sort of like how if you eat what you see, you see what you eat, but not the other way around. The USA's only one of SHIELD's interests." He shrugs. "Your presence within your organization," he goes on, "was judged an untenable threat. Prior to your activation your organization had only been considered a problem, not a nightmare. Your presence changed that. Easier to kill you than your org." He shrugs. "They sent me. Here I am." 

The litany appears to give her time to regain her composure. Her eyes narrow again. "Hawkeye," she says, voice clipped again. "No one's ever put name to face before." 

"Yeah I know I'm not gonna be able to keep that up forever," the man says, conversationally, "but it's kinda fun for now." 

"You killed Feodor Morozov in Kiev," she says, still in the same clipped voice. 

"Yeah I owed him one," the man says. "He insulted my girlfriend once. That and he was a twisted sadistic scumbag, he beat his dog, _and_ he kept selling weapons to really bad people, so all around, he just kinda deserved it." 

"You're playing SHIELD," the girl says, not taking the diversion. The man makes a face. 

"Not really," he demurs. "I'm not into that. Playing stupid fucking games with Nick Fury is not my idea of a good time. But SHIELD just pays me to kill people I don't object to killing, Natalia Alianovna. They don't own me and they don't decide whether I pull the trigger or not: I do. They sent me here, but I'm kinda like the proverbial donkey: you can only lead me to water, you can't make me drink, and I'll probably kick your head in if you try." 

There is a moment of pause. Twice, it looks like the girl is going to speak (if you look carefully, and are good at noticing these things), but she does not. The silence stretches. The man doesn't break it. 

Finally, she says, "You haven't explained," in a hard voice. 

"The Red Room got you before you turned five," he says, and now he's the one who drops into English. He also holds eye-contact and he doesn't sound like he's playing anymore, doesn't sound like he did before. "You went to sleep in your bed and you woke up somewhere else. You spent the next eight years in a bunker under a mountain while they lied to you about everything, and then they've spent the last four years using you to trap and murder anyone they want dead, usually because someone else paid them for it."

She doesn't answer. 

He says, "As far as I'm concerned you don't kill people for being used. That's bullshit." 

"You want to give me a way out," the girl says. Her tone is brutally mocking, but the man doesn't acknowledge it. 

"And you wouldn't be here right now if you didn't want it," he replies. And he is still holding eye-contact, and if she's still holding the gun, she doesn't look away. 

There is silence. 

"Seriously," the man says, and this time it's definitely gentle. "Give your arms a rest. Put the gun down. Have some coffee. Talk to me." 

There is silence again. 

When the girl holsters the gun, the movement is fluid, practiced and seems easy. "I don't drink coffee," she says, coolly, and the man shrugs. 

He says, "I did bring tea."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] your albatross: carry it with no regrets](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12092307) by [echolalaphile](https://archiveofourown.org/users/echolalaphile/pseuds/echolalaphile)




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